


Le Fait Demeure Encore

by Lorbender



Series: The Fact Remains [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Black Hermione Granger, Cinderella Elements, Draco Malfoy Cooks, Draco Malfoy Speaks French, Draco Malfoy went to Beauxbatons, F/M, French Draco Malfoy, Mostly Fluff, Musician Draco Malfoy, Slytherin band, Sort Of, Soulmate Visions, This was great fun, always in my fics, bit of angst, fight me ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26603965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorbender/pseuds/Lorbender
Summary: Draco Malfoy is used to being in the background. But when he has a vision that shows him exactly what he's missing, and he travels to England to find it, he finds himself wanting to be the center of attention.At least as far as Hermione Granger is concerned.(A retelling of The Fact Remains from Draco's POV.)
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Series: The Fact Remains [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1935340
Comments: 7
Kudos: 96





	Le Fait Demeure Encore

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! I got a positive response for The Fact Remains and this popped into my head, so I thought I'd post it. Since my readership seems to be English-speaking for the most part, I did this all in English, but just assume they're actually speaking French unless I explicitly say otherwise.
> 
> Enjoy. Please.

Draco Malfoy is perfectly used to being in the background.

After several years of showboating and idiocy in his teens, he realized that he didn’t actually want attention. He just wanted to make music and be left well alone.

Luckily, that was the point at which Pansy approached him about what was not yet Magique Fort Longtemps. They’d been best friends for years, having sought each other out from the beginning—Beauxbatons’ huge student body notwithstanding—and she and Blaise were prepping a set for the annual Yule celebration.

Draco still remembers her big dark eyes widening as she grinned at him and said, _You like to sing, don’t you?_

She surely knew he did, as secretive as he was about it. She’d heard him, and now she was poking her head into his business. Draco was reticent for a while, until Theo convinced him to join them, and he entered the first practice with his arms brimming with scrolls of finished and half-finished songs, words scribbled down in the middle of the night, chords and verses, notes and strains woven together somehow, with that magic he always had but never felt comfortable acknowledging.

Their first gig had gone well; then they booked another. By the time they graduated they’d received upwards of a dozen offers from some of the biggest names in the worldwide wizarding recording industry. But they decided to do their own thing instead—Draco writing songs and humming under his breath night after night, as Pansy lay with her head in his lap and worked out chords to his work, Theo doing production, Blaise marketing.

Album number one was called _celibataire_. Given the massive fanbase they’d accumulated online in both magical and Muggle circles, it wasn’t that much of a surprise that they topped the charts in France.

The other six countries were a bit more of one.

* * *

It’s been four years, and the fifth album, _depuis longtemps_ , will be out in a month, when their producer Paul (their team’s grown in the past few years) gets an Owl from the British Ministry of Magic.

“Why me?” are the first words to come out of Draco’s mouth when Paul tells them the contents of the call.

“Well, it has to do with reputation,” Paul says. “Blaise, frankly, is perceived as a playboy. Theo has Daphne. Pansy’s, well, Pansy. But people don’t know you so well. They’re intrigued by you, Draco, and they find you a bit less intimidating. Also, you’re chronically single.”

“I wouldn’t say chronically,” Draco grumbles, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. He was up late last night. “When do they want to do it?”

“Two weeks,” Paul says.

“But we start the tour in a month,” Pansy points out. “This timing is rather inopportune.”

“They said they want to release the program to the public by the New Year,” says Paul. “They’re having several celebrities do their visions.”

Draco sighs into the rumpled sleeve of his T-shirt and thinks of the way he likes to toss his hand out across his bed as if reaching out to someone just a few inches too far away, someone soft and warm who, in only a few moments, will curl herself around him.

“Okay,” he says, and sees Pansy’s tiny smile dimly out of the corner of his eye.

Paul nods and gets up to return the Owl back to Britain. Draco goes to make dinner for the four of them as he often does—Daphne was supposed to come tonight but ends up having an unavoidable meeting.

Pansy in the kitchen results in fire, Theo can’t handle cutting onions, and Blaise has very strange ideas of what combinations of things taste good. Besides, Draco likes to cook, likes the rhythm of it, how easy it is to make people happy this way. It certainly seems easier than trying to make music that everyone likes.

That night Draco sighs beside a candle and writes. Sometimes his songs come in bursts like sobs and sometimes slowly and gently like a kiss, and when his quill moves across paper under firelight it’s a ghost and his perpetually cold pale fingers look as spectral. Draco’s always been floating.

The new album will be out in only a few weeks now. The first single will be out next week, the music video a few days later. Everything is falling into place for the fifth album, Draco’s favorite of any of the ones they’ve done—warm and bright and green. But tonight another song comes to him, something totally different, like a siren’s call. _Ton monde et le mien..._ he writes. _Ton monde avant les autres. Me cherche parce que je t’appartiens; sans toi je—_

Nothing else comes. Draco goes to sleep. His arm reaches across the bed, muscles straining, as though tonight at last his fingers will stretch just enough to graze her skin.

* * *

Those two weeks are so hectic that for most of the day, until he’s lying alone at night, Draco doesn’t think about the vision reading.

The Unspeakables come to his flat, which is a bit unexpected. Draco doesn’t even have time to write Pansy before they’re asking him to sit down and telling him what to expect in slow, plodding English that bores him. One of them produces their wand and he signs a piece of parchment they give him before they say, “Take a deep breath, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco does, and closes his eyes. He hears them perform the charm. Then, silence. He panics for a moment, thinking perhaps she’s in a different time zone and asleep, or she’s in a coma, or—

And then he hears something. A voice— _his_ voice. It’s the newest single, the one that came out a few days ago. And underneath it, nearly fully concealed, the sound of breath.

His vision clears: he’s exiting a shop, and when he looks up there’s a sign that reads clearly: World of Books. Draco eagerly drinks in everything around him—the lightly falling snow, a sign ahead that he thinks reads Rose Street, and when she glances down he sees her dark blue coat, her curly hair, and her hands in mittens. But she’s walking down the road, and the Unspeakables said the vision would only last five minutes before his magical core will need to recharge for several months. Will he see enough to find her?

She’s turning off the street before he can wonder any more and he can feel his heart leap with excitement as she enters a flat; as she spells away her wet footprints (so she’s definitely a witch, then), the music quiets. A man comes forward to greet her, grinning and speaking British-accented English, and Draco sags in his seat. The man is handsome, about his own age, with green eyes and messy dark hair and annoying round glasses— and then she turns to the mirror beside her and takes off her scarf.

Draco’s breath catches in her throat. She’s perfect—her heart-shaped face, soft skin, thoughtful eyes. She grins at herself, arranging a curl of hair, then starts to take off her coat.

His vision grows blurry, then fades, and Draco wants to growl as her breath leaves his ears. He leans forward, curving his spine and resting his head in his hands.

When Draco looks up, he finds the Unspeakables gone. A single crow’s feather sits on his kitchen counter. When he Summons it to him he finds an address scratched into its filament.

“And they say the French are pretentious,” he says, and goes to take a shower.

* * *

If there’s one thing Draco’s learned over the years, it’s the sound of Pansy’s voice.

There’s really no good reason why he’s startled when he hears her yell, “DRACO MALFOY!” from outside his shower.

“What?” Draco asks, grabbing a towel to wrap around him so he can get out (she’s seen him naked three times and each was so traumatic that he’s not looking to escalate the number if he can help it).

Pansy leans casually against the wall. “So how was it?”

“You seriously—” Draco sighs. “It was...strange. Fine. Good. Have you eaten? You look hungry.”

“What?” Pansy shakes her head in disgust. “Did you see her or not?”

“I—well, yes, but she was with someone, and I, well, it was just—”

“Gerard!” Pansy shouts, and a man Draco has Never Seen Before But Who Is Now In His Flat Apparently pokes his head in with his hand over his eyes.

“Hello, Mr. Malfoy,” he says. “I’m Gerard, I’m a sketch artist with the Marseilles Auror Department—”

“This is not happening,” Draco tells Pansy.

“Why not?” Pansy scowls. “Between Twitter and magical online communities we have over 50 million people following our accounts. Surely someone will be able to find her.”

“Agh.”

“Come on, Draco,” Pansy says. “You want to find her. I know you do.”

Draco sighs, rubs his temples. “Let me put on some clothes.”

They send out the drawings, and then Pansy somehow manages to convince the British Ministry that it’s a good idea to arrange for them to go to England to find Draco’s soulmate. And while Draco’s reluctance isn’t entirely an act, he’s grateful that Pansy knows him well enough to know that, well, maybe he does want to do all this. But Draco isn’t used to making demands. He likes to be in the background, doing his own things, making people laugh sometimes, cry sometimes, letting his quill become a wraith.

But. She’s there, in Britain, somewhere, he knows it. And he’s never wanted to be visible more than he does now, to her.

When Draco steps out of the Portkey he sees Hermione Granger for the first time and for a moment there’s something so overwhelmingly familiar about her that he catches his breath. A second, longer glance reveals that she’s a stranger, but he still can’t shake the feeling that he knows her. She steps forward and introduces herself in near-perfect French, and smiles, and he remembers that he’s here to look for his soulmate. Who is _someone else_.

So when they sit in the archives together and she laughs at something he says, and when they all get dinner and she asks to try his food and they exchange meals, and when the two of them speak French and English outside the hotel when everyone has gone inside, he tells himself it’s just a fleeting attraction. Perhaps they’ll be good friends.

That first night, Theo and Blaise are thrilled to be in England, thrilled to be doing something other than working. They get drunk on champagne and Pansy and Draco have a little themselves and lie on the couch.

“So, Hermione seems nice,” Pansy says.

“Yes, she does,” Draco agrees.

“JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE, JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE—”

“Whose birthday is it?” Blaise asks Theo, who forgets the song and has to start over.

“It’s the birthday of our beautiful life in England! I love England!!”

“You two seemed cozy,” Pansy comments. The two of them ignore Blaise and Theo as usual.

“Pansy!” Draco sits up, head spinning. “Have you forgotten why we’re here?”

“No,” Pansy says. “I just think sometimes the way things work out can be a surprise.”

After that she leaves Draco and Hermione to their walks in the evenings. On the seventh night, after they’ve spent a day looking at Rose Streets, the two of them go through a park. A song is playing in Draco’s head but he doesn’t know the words to it yet.

“Do you listen to our music?” he says. He can’t believe he hasn’t asked her yet.

“Yes,” she says, tucking a curl behind her ear. He watches her hands; they’re graceful, and larger than he would’ve expected, as though all her careful spellwork and writing has made them adapt to the stresses of Hermione’s lifestyle. “You write all the songs, don’t you?”

“Most of them.”

“I’ve always liked it very much.”

“Always?”

“Since Hogwarts,” she says, grinning. “Eighth year.”

“I forgot so many of you went back,” Draco muses. He’d never known much about the war here; his parents had taken him to France to get away from it, and as such he couldn’t even remember the given name of the Boy Who Lived.

He swallows. “Did you ever have a favorite, out of the four of us? Many people do.”

She shrugs and tilts her head, but not dismissively. He realizes he isn’t sure anymore which language they’re speaking—perhaps a combination of the two? It feels as though words are just pouring from him to her, and back to him, like water flowing downstream, hurtling onward and guided by an inevitable force.

“Most people prefer Blaise or Pansy,” Draco tells her. “I—well, they’re the kind of people your eye is drawn to. They were made for it.”

“My best friend is like that,” Hermione says, and she finally turns her eyes to his. “He’s like a brother to me. As much as I love him, I spent years living behind him. I’m not interested in men like that, who draw your eye immediately. I find they’re usually too hardheaded, too oblivious, to be a match for me.”

“What kind of men are you usually interested in?” Draco asks, and finds they’ve stopped under a streetlight. It turns her cheekbones into bars of light, the curvature of her eye sockets deep and dark, the shadows of her eyelashes long.

“Men who put thought into things,” Hermione says, her eyes defiant. “Who don’t grab attention. Who care for others and who accept care in return.”

She’s looking directly at him now, outlined against the night, and he thinks in this moment she looks so achingly like someone he loved once and can never see again.

* * *

Pansy wakes him the next morning with an Owl in hand and tells him they’re moving up the concert dates.

“What?” Draco asks. “Why?”

“If we do it, we can be in Paris by Yule and get those venues in the north that you liked so much,” Pansy tells him. “It’s in the contract that the venues can change the dates, I’m sorry, Draco.”

“What do you mean, ‘I’m sorry?’” Draco says, rubbing sleep from his eyes and pulling on a shirt.

Pansy gives him a pitying look. “The British Ministry is throwing us a party tonight. I think Hermione will be there. The two of you should talk.”

“Stop it, Pans,” Draco says. “Let me have breakfast, for God’s sake. What do you want to eat?”

Since it’s the last day, and there’s no real hope for Draco in terms of soulmate-finding, they instead go to an overly-expensive department store, where Draco catches Hermione looking at the pen displays and makes up his mind to buy her a beautiful Muggle pen before remembering that that’s not really something new friends do—all in the span of about ten seconds. Afterward they sit at tea, looking a bit morose. Even Theo and Blaise, who normally can’t go five minutes without making some stupid joke, look somewhat down.

At some point Hermione leaves, and Draco can’t even look at her. Knowing that after today he won’t see her for months, if ever again, puts a sick feeling in his stomach. Even worse is the knowledge that somehow, no matter how much he wants to, he’s dreading finding his soulmate, because no matter how wonderful she is, she’ll never be Hermione, and he’ll be conflicted and horrible forever. Two weeks ago he was chronically single. Now he’s in love with two women. He isn’t sure which has been the worse experience.

Draco sleeps for a few hours, puts on a Muggle suit—he’s partial to them, less excess fabric—and heads to the Ministry promptly at eight with the others. He tries to keep himself from scanning the crowd for Hermione and fails, checking around him with a hideous desperation before sighing and turning back toward the entrance to the room just as dinner is called.

That’s when he sees her, looking as warm and hurried as usual, her shoulders squared under her flowing blue dress, her brows drawn together with a thoughtful focus that breaks only when she smiles at someone, that broad smile that shows her neat teeth. He vaguely remembers her telling him something about her parents being teeth healers.

A moving table hits him in the thigh and he stumbles.

“Sit down, Draco,” Pansy says, rolling her eyes. “For God’s sake stop making a fool of yourself on foreign soil.”

He sits, and tracks Hermione to her table, and pretends to pay attention to the horrible rich donors that the Ministry has inevitably seated them with, to their English that seems stilted and slow, not like Hermione’s, which flies forward as though it’ll never speak again. She glances at him a couple of times, and then away, with a resolute expression he doesn’t fully understand. Then he has to dance with some English witches who seem to want to eat him—but are being terribly demure about it, he hates that—and when he finally manages to pull himself away from them he glances around, has a moment of panic when he doesn’t see her, but Pansy, dancing by him, says, “She’s over there, you idiot,” pointing to the corner.

Draco makes a rude gesture at Pansy as he finds Hermione sitting in the corner, looking as though she’s thinking very hard about something. He realizes that he hardly ever thinks about the way she looks; it’s as though her person comes through her skin, shining out, and her looks are almost an unnecessary layer. Something about her face has always seemed off to him.

Hermione looks up as he approaches, her expression guarded. Draco grabs a chair.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello,” he says, trying to figure out how to cram what is really a week’s but feels like a lifetime’s worth of extremely complicated feelings into a few words, and settles on, “You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” she says. “So do you.”

Draco tries not to preen as her eyes flick down his form, and there’s a jolt of electricity in his chest. But he has a purpose here.

“I—” Draco inhales. “I don’t know how to say this in English—”

He sighs and decides to be out with it, fumbling with the words.

“Hermione, I came here looking for my soulmate, and I want to find her, just for...for peace of mind, but—if for any reason—”

Confusion, outright horror, and something like hope run across Hermione’s face in an extremely worrying sequence of events—damn her for being so smart and damn her face for showing everything she’s thinking.

“Draco, there’s something that I have to tell you, before you keep going,” she says, twisting her hands in her lap, and then her eyes snap to something behind him and she gasps. “I have to go.”

Draco turns with her, and stands as she brushes past him, the smell of her skin under lemon and coconut soft in the air, and he tries to follow her but runs into another woman, with short coppery hair and large blue eyes.

“Hello, Monsieur Malfoy,” she says in asphyxiatingly enunciated English. “My name is Penelope Clearwater of the DMLE. I wanted to greet you tonight.”

“Enchanté,” Draco says, following Hermione with his eyes.

“Such a shame Hermione couldn’t make it tonight,” Penelope says, and Draco’s gaze snaps back to her.

“What do you mean?” he says in English, and he can tell his accent becomes more pronounced. “She was just here.”

“That woman you were talking to?” Penelope turns but Hermione’s left the room. “No, that wasn’t Hermione. I think you must have confused her with someone else.”

Draco shakes his head vehemently. “Certainly not. I couldn’t have. We’ve become—friends, you see.”

The other guests have begun to leave as well now, and Pansy, Blaise, and Theo join Draco in the corner.

“What seems to be the matter?” Pansy asks in English.

“Ms. Clearwater says that Hermione isn’t Hermione,” Draco says.

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Malfoy, but I just don’t understand,” says Penelope. “Hermione is curvier than that woman, she has shorter, curlier hair, and her face is just completely different. I saw her just a few hours ago.”

Draco glances at Pansy and the two of them, as they have so many times, have the same thought at the same time.

“No,” Pansy said, covering her mouth with her hand. “Draco, wait, no, I can’t believe it.” But she fishes her cell phone out of her pocket and shows Penelope the photo.

“That’s her,” Penelope says. “Why do you have—”

Theo has his hand over his mouth too, and Blaise is looking at Draco with wide eyes.

“Can you give me her address?” Draco asks, his heart pounding. His face feels tight. There are too many questions—the man she was living with, why she glamoured herself, why she talked to him like that, looked at him like _that_ , God he wants her to keep looking at him like _that_ —

“Please, Ms. Clearwater, I need to find her.”

“I’m afraid that’s classified information,” Penelope says. “You’d need to get special permission from the Minister, or at least the DMLE head.”

“Then we’ll do that,” Pansy says firmly. “Direct us to the DMLE head, please.”

“He’s just left the party,” Penelope tells them. “We’ll need to head up to his office. He usually works until at least two in the morning, and it’s one o’clock now, so he should be there.”

The five of them leave the hall at a brisk walk, and Draco wants to break into a sprint, wants to run to her, no matter how long it takes or how far it is, but he doesn’t.

They knock on the door labeled _Kingsley Shacklebolt, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement,_ and wait an agonizing minute until it opens.

“We have a certain request for you, sir,” says Penelope to the serious man who stands behind the door, and they all spill into his office.

“I need the address of one Hermione Granger, sir,” says Draco and because his heart is going a million kilometers an hour and he’s finding it more and more difficult to speak English right now—without Hermione there to help him find words and understand exactly what he’s saying regardless—he gestures to Pansy to finish explaining.

She does, and shows Shacklebolt the photo, and it takes a full hour of questioning and a half-hour interview with a mysterious-looking Unspeakable before they get the address.

“Unfortunately, all the Apparition points are closed until six-thirty tomorrow morning,” Penelope tells him. “You’ll have to wait to go.”

Draco doesn’t sleep. He just sits in an armchair in his hotel room with his shirt half-unbuttoned and his bow-tie loose around his neck and thinks about what he’s going to say, thinks about whether she wants him, whether she’ll allow herself to want him, whether he can live if she says no.

If she wants him to leave, he’ll leave. He knows this. He’ll do whatever she asks him to.

But he has to try.

At six the next morning he pulls on some clean clothes and heads to the Apparition point without any of the others, although they’d planned to go together. He doesn’t want them to come. This is private. For the first time in years, he wants to be the center of attention. The thought makes him snort as he waits for the point to open up. And waits. And waits.

He sends a Patronus to the Ministry and finds that some Aurors had to shut down the network to make sure a group of smugglers couldn’t Side-Along endangered species out of the country. He grudgingly admits that that’s important, but _his thing is important too, god damn it!_

Finally, at nine-thirty, he can feel the charm start up around him, and as infuriated as he is at its lateness, he gathers his magic and lets space swallow him up and fold and spit him out again. He checks the address once more—Ross Street, not Rose—and wanders around for a few blocks, feeling time slip through his fingers as he tries to navigate the streets of this Muggle neighborhood, until he spots a familiar sign. World of Books.

Draco dashes to the door of the shop and orients himself properly. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the vision. Her home is less than five minutes from here in some direction. Which way did she go?

Turning to the right, he proceeds down the street, first walking, then running as he spots a few familiar buildings. He dashes down Ross Street and spots the correct number, racing up the steps and taking a deep breath as he raises his hand to knock—

The door opens. It’s her.

She looks just as she did in the vision, but he looks down at her hands, and they’re still the same, just a bit too large, and Draco thinks, _Oh_. This was why her face always felt wrong. Because the beautiful woman in his vision, the beautiful woman who’s standing in front of him right now, is Hermione Granger.

“Bonjour,” he says because his brain has just short-circuited.

“How—” Hermione begins. Her eyebrows are drawn together in that way that means she’s thinking. It looks exactly the same on her real face, and yet so different. He wants to re-learn everything he knows about her, watch it move across this face.

“I got your address from the Ministry,” he says. “I hope it’s alright.”

“I was going to ask how you knew it was me,” Hermione says.

She looks confused, but her eyes are bright as ever. She’s looking right at him. She’s always looked right at him, not distracted by anything else.

Draco shrugs, trying to remember all the things he was going to say. “I—well, hier soir, Penelope m’a dit que...she didn’t think that you were...you, et je m’a pris conscience. And I should have known before because you were so brilliant and funny and good to talk to, Hermione, I don’t know why you were glamouring yourself, et je ne sais pas si tu as un amoureux—”

Hermione shakes her head, her face glowing, and he feels like crying.

“—mais, quand même, the fact remains that I’m in love with you, je suis depuis la première fois que je t’ai vu, et donc depuis le moment that...that we talked, and—”

“Moi aussi,” Hermione says, and as she steps toward him he remembers the nights he spent with his hand reaching across the bed, the way he always felt like he was floating just above the surface of the world.

He opens his arms to her.


End file.
